A September Micro-Post Medley

Hello friends,

I join you from the pseudo-fugue state of almost-but-not-quite-done packing in anticipation of moving to (New) Home on SUNDAY.

Now, after a week's break from old job and with just over a week to go before starting new job, I'm getting to feel some genuine, simple excitement.  We are doing this.  It is happening!

My hope is that, in the first week of October, I'll be able to prioritize making mental space for considering how to make a home that, as much as is possible, creates happiness and peacefulness.  I'm really looking forward to this task.

Before literally everything I own is packed away, I want to ensure I write a brief entry for this, the final month I live in City Where I Currently Live.

Commence: A Micro-Post Medley of the Movies I've Seen in September!

"The Wife" (2018)

Oh my goodness I did not care for this movie.  The performances felt strangled by a stagey, stilted, and unbelievable script.  It is an unfortunate irony that the movie suffers from what feels like an under-developed premise and set of characters, and it is about an acclaimed author who is winning the Nobel Prize for literature.  I appreciated the brief glimpses of Stockholm the film afforded, but otherwise "The Wife" unfortunately thoroughly skippable.

Score: 1

"A Simple Favor" (2018)

I delightfully misread the advertising for "A Simple Favor."  It looks like it should just be "Gone Girl" (2014) Redux, since the premise is so similar--a posh-looking and mysterious woman, played by Blake Lively, goes missing, kicking off a slew of gossip in her insular Connecticut town.  However, "A Simple Favor" is much more than a brooding study of dueling psychopaths.  It's a smart, twistedly funny study of dueling maybe psychopaths... who are also maybe friends?  I really enjoyed the film, especially because it is my sense that Lively and her co-star Anna Kendrick might have had a lot of fun making the movie.  Also the costume design is really fun to look at.

Score: 4

"Lizzie" (2018)

There's a lot to like about this re-thinking of the infamous Lizzie Borden axe murders, including the peek it provides into a tensely dysfunctional high-status Boston family as well as the strangely satisfying deeply American Northeastern architecture of the airless spaces in which their dysfunction grows.  Kristen Stewart's portrayal of Bridget, the Borden family's new Irish maid, and Chloë Sevigny's portrayal of the appropriately paranoid and claustrophobic titular character are highly absorbing.  Despite these promising elements, however, "Lizzie" ultimately disappoints as a horror movie or thriller.  Although the Borden murders happened at least a century after the events portrayed in 2015's "The Witch," the aspirations and aesthetics of both films felt similar enough that I felt a bit let down when "Lizzie" didn't deliver nearly as compellingly as its darker, more inventive, and more disturbing counterpart.

Score: 3

"Fahrenheit 11/9" (2018)

On a farewell tour of my favorite theater in City Where We Currently Live, Husband and I went to see Michael Moore's newest offering this week.  I can readily acknowledge that there are plenty of reasonable misgivings to be had about how Moore operates: his clear and deliberate attempts to cultivate and steer the emotions of his audience through cherry-picked facts and footage, his non-linear, unfocused, collage-style film-making whose thought process is at times difficult to follow, and his failure to ever explicitly state what exactly the movie's thesis is are three main complaints relevant to this and other movies he's made.  That being said, I appreciate that there is a lot of worthwhile information and perspective to be absorbed in this film, and I'm glad to have had the opportunity to reflect on what I've inferred to be "Fahrenheit 11/9"'s guiding principle: that America's democracy is very much in peril and has never fully attained its aspirations, and that the active and concerted engagement of the citizenry is urgently needed if we are ever to right the ship upon which we are sailing.

Score: 4.5

And with that: back to packing I go!

{Heart}